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Avalex innovating in key security field

March 16, 2015
/ David Tortorano, Gulf Coast Reporters’ League
/ community-dashboard

Avalex Technologies is a player in the high-growth surveillance sector, and while most of its work is for customers in the United States, international sales are expected to take off. It’s a company any area interested in high-paying jobs and sustainable growth would love to have. It employs well-paid engineers and technicians working on critical cutting-edge technologies in a multibillion-dollar field that’s growing. Avalex Technologies is housed in a multi-story glass façade building that looks like something from Huntsville’s Cummings Research Park transplanted in an area with residential neighborhoods, small businesses and strip malls. And who knows; it may one day be the core business of a modest-sized high-tech park. Avalex is involved in one of today’s hottest technology fields: intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR. It develops, designs and produces airborne and ground-based surveillance equipment for military and law enforcement customers. ISR has become a pervasive part of today’s information dominated world. Companies in the sector provide the unblinking eyes, unwavering memory and analytical capability that help the military and law enforcement achieve “situational awareness.” The airborne ISR market alone will grow in the next decade, from the current $20 billion to $28 billion. And Avalex Technologies is a growing part of the field. Founded 22 years ago in Atlanta, Avalex moved to Pensacola in 2001 then to nearby Gulf Breeze in 2011. Its growth has been noticed. It was in the INC 5000 list of fastest growing companies for four years. “We’ve had this organic growth,” said Avalex president and founder, Tad Ihns, who was raised in Pensacola and got a degree in system sciences in 1982 from the University of West Florida (UWF). “When we came here in ’01, I came here with four other employees.” Today it has 60. [sidebar] Company: Avalex Technologies Location: 2665 Gulf Breeze Parkway, Gulf Breeze, Fla. 32563 Established: 1992 No. of local workers: 60 Focus areas: airborne and ground-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance Types of workers: software, mechanical and electrical engineers, production, marketing, sales, accountants, support. Employment information: www.avalex.com/careers [/sidebar] Avalex develops, designs and manufactures products in a 53,000 square-foot building that once housed a Ford dealership. It has equipment that allows it to make virtually everything it needs from a range of materials, including aluminum, copper, steel, stainless steel and a variety of engineering plastics. It also has a 3D printer that it uses for modeling. Avalex has seven product lines: displays, smart multi-function displays, mission computers, cockpit management systems, digital video recorders, digital mapping systems, and video routing systems. With all the iterations and various other parts, the number of products is substantial. “We probably make more than 250 different products,” said Ihns. The company even makes its own circuit boards and is experimenting with a board with bending circuits to handle higher speeds of data transmission. Most of its custom-made mission avionics products are used by government entities in the United States. “We sell domestically to everyone from the California Highway Patrol to Texas Department of Public Safety to Tampa Police. On the federal level we sell to the DEA, to the FBI and to Customs and Border Protection,” Ihns said. That includes direct sales as well as sales to prime contractors. “We sell to the Air Force and to the Army and to the Navy, some to the Marine Corps, but the Army and the Air Force are the primary groups that we sell to,” said Ihns. There are several Avalex displays on each CV-22, and the AC-130s, HH-60 Pavehawks and other Air Force aircraft all have products from Avalex. There are also multiple systems on the Navy P-3s aircraft. While domestic sales are the largest, the foreign customer base is growing. Avalex has sold internationally for 15 years, and today foreign sales account for 15 percent of its business. But the number is going up now that Avalex has a sales office in Swindon, an hour west of London’s Healthrow Airport, to service Europe, the Middle East and Africa customers. The sales office is able to convince customers that Avalex will be able to provide support. Ihns said that makes a difference, and he thinks it will have a dramatic impact on foreign sales. “I see it increasing significantly.” Indeed, during a reporter’s visit to Avalex, work was being done on an airborne surveillance system for law enforcement in the United Kingdom. Avalex has grown substantially since moving from Georgia to Florida, prompting the company to look for room to grow. It found what it needed east of Gulf Breeze proper. “It’s a fabulous location,” Ihns said, praising Santa Rosa County for being “nothing but wonderful.” He said Shannon Ogletree, head of the county’s economic development, has been a big help every step of the way. About a third of the workers at Avalex Technologies are software, mechanical and electrical engineers, while a third are production workers and the remainder are support. Generally, engineers move to the area from other locations, Ihns said. “Typically most people are from outside although we had two recent hires from UWF for software engineers,” said Ihns. Because of the area’s growing need for engineers and technicians, Avalex joined with other technology companies three years ago and formed Innovation Coast. “We started that to raise the profile of technology companies in the local area, to try to address the recruiting challenge. Because most people think of the area as being oriented towards tourism, healthcare, military primarily,” Ihns said. He points out that Atlanta, Charlotte, Austin and other cities have grown because of the health of their technology based sectors. “The communities have invested heavily to make sure those segments grow, because those bring in a lot of good paying jobs, start spinoffs … we have to try to form the critical mass in this area to do that,” he said. Ihns said that over the three years of Innovation Coast’s existence, it’s made tremendous progress. In November, Innovation Coast had a competition for startup company business plans. With funding provided by Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development organization, $100,000 was awarded to IRIS, a local startup that developed an eye scan for early detection of diseases. One of the more intriguing ideas for the Avalex site is the possibility of a larger technology campus, with Avalex as the core. The site is 9.5 acres, and there’s room for a 40,000 square foot building to the east and an 80,000 square foot building to the west. The Avalex building itself also has some 7,000 square feet of unused Class A office space that was once a dealership showroom. One aerospace operation looked, and a biotech group even wrote up a floor plan, but the deal never reached fruition. Ihns said it would be perfect for professional, biotech, attorneys, or engineers. And while the Avalex site doesn’t have runway access that could be beneficial for an aerospace company, helicopters have used the back lot of the building. All this is occurring at time when the Gulf Coast I-10 region is pushing to lure more aerospace and aviation activities. In Santa Rosa County, two parks that target aviation received certification under Gulf Power’s “Florida First Sites” program. One of them, Santa Rosa Industrial Park in Milton, will be the new home for Aerosync Support, which specializes in helicopter repair, modifications and upgrades. The company, which also has operations in Kansas and Colombia, said in January that it’s investing $1.75 million and will have 25 employees. In nearby Pensacola, Singapore-owned VT MAE, formerly ST Mobile Aerospace, is establishing a 300-worker maintenance, repair and overhaul facility at Pensacola International Airport. That company also has a 1,000-worker MRO in Mobile, Ala., not far from where Airbus is building a $600 million, 1,000-worker A320 jetliner final assembly line that opens in the fall of this year. GulfCoastAerospaceCorridor.com is a website created in 2008 to highlight aerospace activities along the Interstate 10 corridor between New Orleans and Northwest Florida. It includes reference material, job postings, a daily aerospace newsfeed and weekly column. In 2011, the website teamed with several journalists to create the Gulf Coast Reporters’ League, which writes and publishes an annual book about aerospace in the region. The first book was published in June 2011. In September 2013, the League launched an eight-page quarterly aerospace newsletter, which became a bimonthly in August 2014 after the League published the fourth edition of the annual. All the books can be found here, and all the newsletters can be found here.

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Avalex innovating in key security field

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