Today, our "Best of the Best Executive Series" focuses on Chris Burton, CEO of WaveCreste, one of North America's leaders in Rural-Sourced IT Solutions.

TheStreetSmartVAR: Tell us about WaveCreste?

Chris: Sure, WaveCreste which was formed early last year is what we call a Rural Sourced IT solutions provider and what that means is that we provide a full range of IT solutions whether that is application development, testing, system support, replatforming of existing systems a lot of different types of solutions that we support but our model is unique in that we leverage a Rural Sourced center.

In our case, we have one center in Abilene, Texas.  Typically within our model, we will have roughly 20% of a project team at the client's site working directly with our clients and the rest of the team is back in our rural center doing the rest of the project. So in this case we are pretty unique because a lot of IT solutions work has been off-shored over the last several years and we are really focused on North America Customers who would like or need to have their solutions provided from a North America solution.

TheStreetSmartVAR: Who are your target clients or markets?

Chris: We are really looking at medium to large communications service providers, cable companies, and high tech companies. Typically, companies that have large IT departments with large and wide ranging IT solution requirements and are a good fit for our model.

TheStreetSmartVAR:  Where do you see the most significant growth occurring in your company in the next few years?

Chris: We see most of the growth coming from companies who require complex fast turnaround projects and assignments that don't offshore well. Typically when customers or clients are going to offshore work there is a lengthy transition period and a lot of knowledge transfer going on and we are a more local solution, we don't require nearly as much startup time. So when we see complex and fast turn around projects coming down the pipe that is more our stock and trade.

TheStreetSmartVAR: What's driving the momentum around Rural Sourced IT?

Chris:  The Indian IT services industry is between $80 billion and $100 billion a year, depending on who you talk to, and when you factor in Russia, China, Brazil, and some new developments in South East Asia that is tremendous amount of work that has been pushed off shore.

Most of the CIOs that we serve and talk to have tremendous cost pressures and these pressures have led them to move away from keeping a lot of their functions in-house and into off-shoring. However, off-shoring hasn't always worked well for them, given the cultural differences, time zone, and attrition issues. Nevertheless, they still have these pressures, so we believe that we fall into a very nice niche where they can save often times 30 plus percent from their metro US based teams that they currently have without all the headaches associated with off shoring.

TheStreetSmartVAR: Is Rural Sourced IT a competitive advantage for your client vs. going overseas?

Chris: Yes that is our belief, we believe when take everything into consideration such as the total value which includes your objectives a lot of the per hour rate difference between off shoring and what we offer is offset by the management challenges a customer experience. The challenges such as communications difficulties, delivery failures, and time zone challenges combine to actually decrease the amount of value that clients receive from off shoring.

In contrast, we have low attrition rates, retain our people longer and keep them involved in the customer's business longer.  We believe that once you take those into consideration, Rural Sourced IT is of equal or greater value.

TheStreetSmartVAR:  Tell us about your company culture and do you think that plays a role in your success?

Chris: Well we believe in very straight talk here at WaveCreste and being very results focused and that is both internal as well as external in the work that we do for our clients. We try very hard to understand exactly how the client is going to view success for a given engagement or project and chart our activities as close as possible to get to that point. It's the same process internally, we believe that results speak for themselves and we stay wired very tight to that goal and I think that it does play a role in our success because our clients really see that we are all about the project's success. So, we have a very client centric results focused view of life and that's apparent when companies work with us.

TheStreetSmartVAR: From your view point, do you see any interesting trends in the marketplace?

Chris: Sure, the biggest trend that we see is the move to the cloud and I know that is the buzz word of the year, maybe of the decade but we definitely see it happening. People maintaining large data centers and keeping all of their applications in-house is becoming a thing of the past and so whether it is software companies now having to offer their solutions as the software is a service (SaaS) or other ways of leveraging the cloud you know we see that as a huge swing and something that our clients are continually asking us about and are interested in moving towards. The move to the cloud means a lot of different things to different industries, so it is hard to categorize it but definitely distributed computing and different models based on cloud technologies is very pervasive trend.

TheStreetSmartVAR: Are there any new solutions or services or initiatives that you are planning on rolling out this coming year?

Chris: There are a couple; one is technology replatforming, somewhere I mentioned the cloud, where we are seeing a lot of client interest in moving some of their in-house applications to be more cloud based but often times that requires either reprogramming them in a different language that is more cloud friendly or putting them on a technology platform that is more suitable for cloud based computing. So that is one of our initiatives is to build a bigger practice around that client need.

The other initiative that we have is around full application management, we have done a lot of projects around testing and systems support in a production support environment and we are building more of a full application management managed services offering such that we can basically support applications all the way from requirements through long term systems support.

TheStreetSmartVAR: How do you want to be perceived by your customers and the marketplace?

Chris: I would say there are three main ways; the first is high value, we compete with both metro US client based competitors in which our prices are lower and with offshore providers where our per hour prices are a little bit higher but we are really focus on the value of what we are bringing, so in the end, we want to be perceived as high value.

The second thing that we focus on is really being results focused. In other words, we strive to internalize how our client's view results and then making sure that the projects are laser-focused on achieving those results. The last element is that we really want to be easy to do business with. I have been both a client and consumer of IT support and I have been an IT solution provider for many years and I would say that the one thing that defines the winners from the losers is being easy to do business with.

TheStreetSmartVAR: Do you take a consultative approach in terms of your client conversations or is it strictly IT?