MAYBVM

122 123 advantages over their larger less nimble competitors. “We pride ourselves on one of our core skills which is going to a customer and listening–not saying,‘Hey, here are our wares.’We like to go in and say,‘What’s that difficult wireless or networking problem that you’re facing in your infrastructure?’We’ll listen to the customer and then say,‘We thinkwe have something for you,’or ‘No,sorry,we don’t have something for you.’ We like to architect and engineer customsolutions for those industrial customers. “And so,if you lookat the different vertical markets that we’ve been involved in and try to drawsome commonalitybetween them,themost common thing is,typically,we’re entering into amarket that tradition- allyhas been resistive to newer technologies-and they’ve been resistive because newer technologies aren’t reliable enough or they’re not secure enough. And that’s wherewe’ve always been a champion for those customers.The solutions that we’ve brought are the solutions that are secure and reliable enough that theycan take advantage of awireless network infra- structure.We gowhere there are pain points; if there’s amarket that needs good network connectivity,that’s wherewe go.” Nelson reports thatAvaLANhas had five consec- utive years of double-digit growth.“We’vemade the Inc.5000 list two years in a rowas a Fastest Growing Company,andwe think that we’ve really just begun to scratch the surface of our growth potential,”he de- clares.“Even thoughwe’ve been a company for almost 13 years,we feel likewe’re still a start-up in a lot of ways.The future for us is not just network connectivity for retail fuel pumps,but any sort of pedestal where there is a credit card transaction.We have deployed AVALANWIRELESS SYSTEMS thousands of units into all the divisions of Kroger Foods,for connections inside their stores for mobile,point-of-sale carts, combining that technologywith our outdoor wireless technology,which is what led us to dealingwith the payment systems for outdoor payment.And now, that’s extending into other applications where there’s outdoor payment.On top of that,we’re doing quite a bit of network segmentation,wherewe’re doingmore sophisticated networking associatedwith those transactions tomake sure they’re secure in theway they’re being handled in the cyberworld. “And becausewe’ve been doingmore andmore of that,we’ve actuallyopened