Non-linear creations (NLC) is an Ottawa-based e-business solutions provider that’s been in business for the past 16 years. In this time, the company has grown to work with more than 500 customers around the globe.Shannon Ryan, president and CEO at NLC, is also one of the company’s co-founders.
Randy Woods, who serves as the company’s executive vice-president is the other co-founder.
As the Web has evolved over the years, Ryan said NLC has continued to adapt its offerings to keep up with the trends.
Today, the company focuses its business around three key areas: strategic consulting and planning to help organizations understand how to more effectively use Internet technologies to drive their business forward, professional services and implementation services offerings which also includes deployment, as well as online marketing and analytics offerings.
With customers scattered around the world and a technical team spread across Canada, in addition to an office in New York City and remote development based in Brazil, Ryan said NLC primarily works in the business to business (B2B) space with large enterprise customers.
In total, Ryan said NLC employs just under 70 people.
While the majority of the world’s businesses struggled with growth during the recession, NLC achieved “very strong revenue and client acquisition growth,” Ryan said.
In 2010, the company achieved a 27 per cent increase year over year. Last year, NLC also opened up an office in New York to serve the central regions of the U.S. and Canada, he explained.
“Sixty per cent of our business comes from Canada, 30 per cent comes from the U.S. and 10 per cent comes from our international sales,” Ryan said. “On the product and solutions side, there’s been a tremendous amount of uptake on our strategic services. Our Microsoft SharePoint business continues to gain critical growth and momentum and we’ve also done a lot of work with internal collaboration and social internal computing to highlight what SharePoint has to offer.”
As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, NLC won two awards at the annual Impact awards last year. The first was for Microsoft’s Choice Partner of the Year, which is an award chosen based on nominations by Microsoft employees across Canada, and the second was for Microsoft’s Marketing Innovation Award.
Ryan said one of the things NLC has been extremely focused on is continuing to deliver business value, regardless of what product or technology they’re offering.
“We talk business first and that message has resonated with us and Microsoft,” he said.
“The team had responsibility for speaking engagements, seminars and whitepapers and focuses on things like social computing.”
Although Ryan said it’s difficult to define what enterprise social computing is, he does say it’s “a blurred line these days.”
“Social computing is around trying to leverage the social aspects of blogs, wikis, communities and conversation threads to build connections with individuals,” Ryan said.
“A big part of this is all around search. Far too often people think about search as being able to find a document, which they think is the correct answer. But a lot of the time, it’s really about finding the right person to speak with to get that answer.”