A Q&A with Gerry Mangrum, CEO of Cognent

Gerry Mangrum took what seems an unlikely path to his job as the CEO of Cognent, an information technology and Internet firm. He spent seven years in the Marines and the remainder of his military career in the Navy, retiring as a lieutenant commander about seven years ago. He keeps his hand in military life as the Navy ROTC instructor at Socorro High School.     A Q&A with Gerry Mangrum, CEO of Cognent by Dan Huff Gerry Mangrum took what seems an unlikely path to his job as the CEO of Cognent, an information technology and Internet firm. He spent seven years in the Marines and the remainder of his military career in the Navy, retiring as a lieutenant commander about seven years ago. He keeps his hand in military life as the Navy ROTC instructor at Socorro High School. He also teaches government at El Paso Community College and maintains an interest in local politics. Mangrum, a service-connected disabled veteran, serves on the Armed Forces Committee for the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce and the BizTek Committee of the Hispanic Chamber. He's also awaiting an appointment to the City of El Paso's ethics commission, and he's served on the budget review committee for the El Paso Independent School District. But Mangrum's main concern these days as CEO of Cognent, a five-person firm that includes his partners Martin Paredes and Valerie Saenz, is the company's mission to help small- to mid-size local businesses take advantage of the Worldwide Web. El Paso Inc. interviewed him at Cognent's Executive Center headquarters. Q. How did you get involved with a company that deals with information technology, and what exactly does Cognent do? We do pretty much everything in one company here. We construct websites, we host them, we host e-mails, we manage domains, we do custom software, we do hardware installation and we set up wireless systems. We also do database management, storage - just a whole array of things that make our product line pretty comprehensive. This company has been in existence for about 18 months, and last June they asked me to come aboard because they were hoping to get some new blood and a fresh look at what they were doing. Since then we've created a business plan and some direction, and we've also improved our infrastructure so that now we run our servers and have all our storage at a couple of different sites. One site is here in El Paso at the Chase Bank building Downtown, which we chose because it has its own generator in case the power goes out. Another site is in Dallas, and we also have a backup site in Orlando, Fla. Having multiple sites creates stability and allows us to offer non-interrupted service to our customers. We don't have to worry about any kind of natural or manmade event that might knock us offline. We're also acquiring a company in Dallas called Splendid Technology. It's a three-man operation, but they have a solid customer base and they're hooked in with a network that we want to take advantage of in the Dallas market. So we're going to branch out from El Paso and get a little bigger. Q. Why should any of this Internet stuff matter to El Paso's small businesses, especially those that have been around for decades? In the next five to seven years the telephone book is going to come in second when it comes to looking up businesses to satisfy your needs. During this last BizTek, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce trade show, there was a statistic that was thrown out there - 87 percent of today's teenagers are Internet savvy. Well, that's your future customer base. And what they're going to do is just what I do right now when I need to find a movie, a restaurant or an address for a business. I jump on the Internet, pop up Google, type in a name. And what happens? A list of local businesses comes up - if they have a website. I click on a site to see what that company features and to find out everything I need to know about them. So if a local business doesn't have a website, I'm probably not going to pay any attention to them. Furthermore, with all the military people moving to town as a result of the latest base closures and realignments, you can be sure all these soldiers are researching everything through the web. They're researching daycare and dance studios for their kids. They're researching gymnastics, sports, card shops, the whole bit. Not only for the big-ticket items like homes, but everything else as well. We've got 20,000 soldiers coming here with roughly 1.8 family members per soldier, because many of them have a spouse and a couple of kids, and these people coming in from all around the United States are definitely Internet savvy. Unfortunately, many of the businesses in El Paso still seem to be of an old-fashioned mindset. I can use the builders as an example. In fact they're a very good example because of all the construction that's going to happen as a result of this influx of soldiers - something like $20 billion worth of construction here in the next 10 years. Ray Aduato, who just left as executive officer of the El Paso Association of Builders, told me he's had a real hard time with the small contractors and subs not understanding that a website presence is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. That's because with all the work coming in the next few years, there's going to come a time when the builders will have a hard time finding enough subs. Each builder tends to work with three or four subcontractors - for drywall, concrete, electrical, plumbing or whatever. Those contractors and subcontractors who learn to use the Internet are going to have plenty of work for their companies. That's because people will be able to find them more easily and determine immediately if they're right for a given job. And then you have these mom-and-pop operations that have been around for years. They need to understand that times have changed and they can't rely on their old client base to keep their businesses solvent. If they don't embrace the Internet, they're going to miss a big chunk of the new customer base, even as their old customers are moving around, because the whole complexion of El Paso will be changing. As a citywide economy, we're on our way to the next level one way or another. The question is, who's going to be going there with us. Q. So what would a small flower shop have to pay for a website? They have a choice. If they just wanted a one-pager to tell people about their products, their hours of business and a phone number, it could be as low as $350. We have a three-pager that can go for $499. But we can also go all the way up to a 10-pager that can do all the bells and whistles - surveys, click counters and online sales - and that can run anywhere from $2,500 to $8,000, depending on the labor involved. Q. The kind of money that may be coming into El Paso as a result of the military expansion is bound to lift all boats, but couldn't the city be more organized in the way it takes advantage of that? Wouldn't it make sense, for example, to look for ways to make El Paso a high-tech city? The computer is becoming just like any other time-saving or labor-saving device, like the coffee pot or the washing machine. Soon it will go with you wherever you go. The folks in Philadelphia and San Francisco recognize that, and they're working to make it possible to wirelessly tap into the Internet from anywhere in their cities. The technology is called “wi-fi,” and I think that's something we should consider for El Paso as well. My partner, Martin Paredes, recently gave me a good example of why wi-fi is fantastic. He says we could each have one portable phone tied to the web, and it would work anywhere in the world we could tap into a wi-fi system. The people in Socorro have been holding discussions about making the Mission Trail a wireless zone so they can entice businesses to come in. And that's where wi-fi might help out more than anyplace else - outside El Paso in small towns like Vinton, Socorro and Horizon. Having wi-fi available all around town would draw new residents and businesses. I mean some people are making decisions on where to eat lunch based on whether there's a wi-fi hotspot in the restaurant. Martin is the outgoing chairman for the IT advisory board for the City of El Paso, and at one time they were discussing a citywide wireless network. But Time Warner is against it. That company is doing a satellite test on the Eastside right now because they're planning to roll out their own wi-fi system. The problem is the telecoms like Time Warner and SBC don't want a municipal wi-fi zone because it would compete directly with them. If you wi-fi the whole area, then there's no reason for people to hook up to Roadrunner or DSL. The wi-fi issue is also under discussion at the state level, too. Basically Time Warner is trying to outlaw it. But we favor anything that fosters more technology, because it will lead to the creation of industries and products that haven't even been thought of yet.

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