NIMBL

Denver

www.benimbl.com

Founded: 2009

Privately owned

Employees: 60 (plus 40 full-time consultants)

SAP specialist and Denver-based NIMBL tap a MFG pedigree to drive growth, to the delight of Michael Pytel and co-founder Yosh Eisbart

Founded by ex-IBM employees in 1972, SAP is the German multinational enterprise software corporation with more than 60,000 employees worldwide and one of the best known brands in the ERP world. Today it is the largest maker of business software on Earth, with product lines stretching from supply-chain management solutions to application servers.

And SAP's technology continues to evolve and change -- which is where companies like NIMBL enter the picture.

NIMBL co-founders Yosh Eisbart and Michael Pytel started working together on an SAP implementation in Denver in 2004.

"My next gig was to help a very large staffing company build out an SAP practice," says Eisbart, the company's CEO. "I brought in Michael right away."

In three years, Pytel and Eisbart grew the practice from $3 million to $30 million.

On a flight back from a sales call in Salt Lake City in 2008, the pair decided to go on their own and start NIMBL. "We said, 'You know what? We can do this ourselves,'" says Eisbart. "We decided to put up our own shingle."

They focused on project work, but Eisbart says he was focused on delivery, not sales. "For the first three years of NIMBL's existence, I was 100 percent billable," he says. "It was short-sighted."

As of 2012, when NIMBL had 12 employees, Eisbart pivoted to sales. A year later, the company has hired nearly 50 new employees, and continues to grow.

"We are really carving out a niche as North America's SAP technologist," says Eisbart. "We're providing bleeding-edge consulting on brand-spanking-new SAP technology. We're helping customers better understand how to implement SAP technology-wise."

NIMBL has a laser focus on SAP. "We're SAP only," says Eisbart. "We're SAP technologists by DNA."

"Our differentiator is we're not vertical-centric, we're horizontal," he adds. "Instead of focusing on a vertical, we focus on SAP technology."

Past and present clients include a wide range of manufacturers, including Carhartt, Crocs, Johns Manville, and Nestle.

To accommodate the growth, the company just moved from the TAXI development in Denver's River North (RiNo) neighborhood to the Art District on Santa Fe.

"It's an old 1950s gas station that's been repurposed as creative office space," says Eisbart, touting perks such as Ink! Coffee, a CrossFit gym, and pull-out gymnasium bleachers for big events.

The company's SAP Managed Services has largely underpinned the boom. The "24/7, 365-days-a-year service-level agreement" manages clients' SAP solutions from the cloud. "When they're having a problem at three in the morning, they have someone to call," says Eisbart. "As opposed to offshoring, NIMBL is supporting Fortune 500 and mid-market companies from Denver."

NIMBL co-founder and CTO Pytel, who started his career in manufacturing, says SAP can actually integrate into the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on a production line. "SAP has a tool called Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence, or MII," he says. "It eliminates the potential for human error."

ONe NIMBL client, Topcon Positioning Systems, makes GPS systems for heavy equipment. "They leverage SAP for their production planning and procurement...determining when it's the right time to order parts. It helps them avoid a lot of unnecessary impact to their bottom line."

Challenges: "Finding enough SAP talent," says Eisbart. "It's tough. It's a hot market." And Colorado isn't a huge SAP hotspot like Atlanta or the Bay Area, he adds. "The resources are limited. We've relocated people from all over the country to support our customers."

Opportunities: "The opportunity is to continue to on this trajectory and maintain this hockey stick growth," says Eisbart. "I'm confident we can." He forecasts the company could double in size by the end of 2014.

Needs: Eisbart says the State of Colorado needs to continue "to support the amazing work being done here and continue to support local companies that are growing the economy."