GLOBAL
IN SCOPE,
LOCAL AT HEART
From three employees to
1,000, USC has provided
the perfect home for
Accion Labs.
BY PAUL GLASSER
I
n five years, Accion Labs has grown from three employees in a
“rustic” Upper St. Clair office park to more than 1,000 on four
continents.
Accion Labs is an information technology services company that
creates software for clients in the healthcare, supply chain logistics and
financial industries, as well as other fields. The company also helps
place candidates in a wide variety of technology positions. There are
22 employees at the Upper St. Clair office and about 40 embedded
with various client offices downtown. Accion Labs has expanded to
include more than 900 employees in offices across the United States
and around the world including India, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia
and Britain.
Sandesh Sukumaran, Vice President for Talent Acquisition, says
Upper St. Clair is an ideal location for the company’s headquarters
because the talent pool is very good. Operations Manager Amy Halter
added that the office also has easy access to downtown Pittsburgh. “It
has all the ingredients for a tech center,” Sukumaran says.
Sukumaran, along with Chief Executive Officer Kinesh Doshi and
Senior Vice President for Sales Tony Kernan, created Accion Labs in
2011. They all had experience in the information technology industry,
but Kernan says nobody takes their success for granted. “We still have
a startup mentality,” he says. “We don’t feel like we’ve arrived. I still
walk in here as nervous as I was the first day.”
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Clients usually come to Accion Labs with a software design and
ask the company to develop, implement and test it. “We help clients
realize their ideas,” Sukumaran says.
Although Accion Labs’ employees work in offices around the world,
innovations in communications technology allow clients to hold
meetings every morning with Accion Labs’ software engineers. This
means the firm can be very responsive to a client’s needs, which is
important because product requirements can change in the span of a
few hours.
“The client is still the captain of the ship,” Sukumaran says. “You can
almost touch and feel employees, even if they aren’t sitting across the
table from you.”
Halter says being responsive is essential for success. “In the
technology industry, time is like dog years,” she says. “One hour for us
feels more like seven hours.”
Despite the company’s success, Sukumaran notes that there is
still a lot to accomplish. Future goals include opening a new office
in Europe and staying on the cutting edge of technology. Accion
Labs created an innovation center last year and Kernan s