GLASTONBURY — Tsunami Tsolutions LLC began with two men in an attic, two computers and a seed investment of $3,000, penny-pinched from the personal savings of co-founders Matthew Atwater and Kevin James Wollmann.
Thirteen years later, the $10 million revenue company provides complex information technology and engineering solutions to a who’s who of the aerospace industry. Tsunami competes with juggernauts Accenture and McKinsey & Company on the business side, and Hewlett-Packard and IBM on the IT front. In the last five years, average revenue surged 20 percent and the company is on a hiring mode, adding to its current headcount of 125 — the firm has recruited 29 employees since January of this year, with six positions currently open. Plans are on the drawing board to expand to Singapore and Dubai via the merger and acquisition route.
With a trajectory like that, you wouldn’t expect Atwater to have been expelled from a private Catholic school at the age of 15. His offense? “Attitude and burning my tie,” Atwater said. He then moved to Rockville High School, dropping out just before his 16th birthday, driving his mom, who has a master’s degree in education, and his dad, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, into panic.
After sitting in on a couple of poetry classes at Eastern Connecticut State University, Atwater completed IT certification courses and started offering IT support to local aerospace companies. He was barely 17.
“It’s lucky for me that in the mid ’90s, talented IT staff were in short supply,” Atwater said. “If you were good with a PC and had a couple of software languages under your belt, you could go into the world with basic knowledge of HTML and some networking chops and make a decent living.”
But he didn’t plan on opening his own business until he met Wollmann, his colleague at a consulting firm in East Hartford. The duo launched Tsunami out of Wollmann’s house in Windsor when their employer went belly-up after a customer outsourced several million dollars’ worth of aerospace work. Atwater was 24 at the time.
“We decided that we’d target work that’s complex, requires a lot of interaction with the customer, and best done when close to subject matter experts,” he said. Tsunami’s initial revenue was garnered from technical writing work for power generation companies including FuelCell Energy in Danbury. They also provided IT support for nonprofits, including website setup and training in computer usage. It was only two years after launch that the company was able to break into the aerospace business in 2005.
After Wollmann died in 2007 of a heart attack at the age of 48, Atwater shifted Tsunami’s focus almost entirely to aerospace. Of the four business segments: aerospace, military, power generation and maintenance and repair, 95 percent of revenue is accrued from aerospace and the military businesses.
The company specializes in fleet management, for instance, taking data that’s streaming off an aircraft and using it to determine the health of that aircraft. Solutions range from analyzing the data to managing the records for regulatory purposes.
To accommodate its growing headcount, Atwater is in the process of doubling the square footage at the Glastonbury headquarters. The company also operates out of offices in Windsor Locks and East Hartford and has more than doubled the space in its Florida facility.
The client roster is expanding as well. In the last year alone, Tsunami signed on two Fortune 100 customers and six smaller aerospace companies. Atwater requested that the Courant withhold customer identities due to confidentially agreements.
Much of the company’s growth is driven by the military business. With older systems running longer than they were intended, for example the U.S. Air Force’s more than 35-year-old F-16 Fighting Falcon jet is still being used by foreign customers, maintenance is big business. Tsunami helps manage the components on the F-16 as well as on various commercial aircraft, including the A320.
Another area driving customer acquisition is federal drug and alcohol prevention compliance. “We keep track of audit programs,” Atwater said. “We come in and do a pre-audit for clients and help make any changes before the audit findings.”
Tsunami expects to close the year with revenue of $12 million, up from $8.75 million in 2014. So what’s the competitive edge? “Me, IBM, the guys from India, we’re all using the same tools, we all know the same programming languages, we all can see the same design patterns, and as long as we are reasonably smart people, the winner is going to be the lowest bidder,” Atwater said. “In our mind, the differentiator is that we’ve got people who’ve built the parts, who’ve been on the production line, who’ve done repair or built a system like this for a previous model.”
Atwater said Tsunami wouldn’t be as successful competing without a superior talent pool, drawn from the state’s top-notch aerospace industry. His team consists of MBAs, engineers and Ph.D.s, some with nearly 50 years of experience, that he managed to pluck from customers from within and out-of-state.
But the biggest challenge, Atwater said, was in recruiting younger employees who are needed to keep payroll costs in check, currently at $8 million a year. “New graduates are all taken by the big companies like UTC [United Technologies Corp.] and I’ve had no luck selling Connecticut as a region people want to move to, that’s why I’ve changed negotiation tactics,” he said.
When Atwater and his employees need downtime, they play virtual reality games like fetch with a dog. While it’s fun and relaxing, the team is exploring ways in which they can simulate parts that need to be repaired, and also how they can help train maintenance personnel to fix problems.
“We could create scenarios that are dangerous or difficult to find in the real world — say, parts that are damaged in a very specific way. It’s easy to simulate virtually, might be a lot more complicated to find a part that really shows that damage,” he said.
Even though manufacturing has very long lead times integrating technology, Atwater likes to look ahead. “We thought if we’re exploring and working with VR now, we’ll have the experience when the time arises.”
