Software for Hard Decisions

By Tim Knauss, Syracuse Newspapers, December 05, 2004

Syracuse, New York, December 5, 2004 – After years of helping corporate clients make decisions about such things as where to site a factory or whether to buy another company, attorney Rhett L. Weiss set out to create software that would help clients manage the myriad details that go into such decisions.

Weiss, 43, left his job at the accounting firm KPMG in 1999 and founded Dealtek Ltd., in Virginia. His quest to develop software led him to move the one-person company in 2001 to Central New York, where he runs it today from Skaneateles.

Why Central New York?

Weiss knows deals, not software. He contracted with Purplewire LLC - a former division of Syracuse Research Corp. that spun off as a private company in 2001 - to write the software and to host it on its servers so that clients could get at it over the Internet.

During the final stages of developing the software, Weiss moved to Central New York to be near the Purplewire team.

DEALS software - the acronym stands for development, expansion and location solutions - was launched in March 2002.

The software provides county-by-county data on economic and demographic characteristics and enables users to update the data based on new information or special incentives they might receive from local governments.

Users rank their priorities - such as proximity to highways and airports, the availability of labor, or the cost of taxes and utilities. They also input company projections of revenues, employment, capital expenditures and so on.

Blending all the data, DEALS helps users model the outcome for their projects in various locations and configurations.

The 198 subscribers to DEALS fall into two main categories: companies, which pay $7,500 per project to use the software; and economic development agencies, which pay $4,000 a year to use it.

Among the software users are Onondaga County's economic development department, Niagara Mohawk, IBM, Hyundai Motor Co. and BMW Group.

In addition to providing the software on a stand-alone basis, Weiss still offers his consulting services. His plan when he founded Dealtek was to use consulting fees to pay for the development of the software.

Consulting still provides the majority of revenue, Weiss said, but that balance could shift. In less than three years, DEALS has been used in 25 countries.

View this article at Syracuse.com.

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