Secrets of the fastest-growing techs

No. 6 on Business 2.0's list of the 100 fastest-growing technology companies

While now-forgotten giants of Internet consultants like Scient and Viant splurged on talent and fancy office space and then disappeared in the bust, Austin-based Perficient stayed lean and mean and rode out what CEO Jack McDonald calls the industry's "nuclear winter." Now he's snapping up smaller shops to keep Perficient growing fast.

On what IT consultants actually do: If you look at Global 2000 companies, they have massive investments in systems that control finance, operations, logistics, supply chain, human resources, and so on. And those systems today don't talk to each other. They just spew out data. What we do is knit those systems together, open them up using portal software and the Internet, and deliver that data to our customers so that they can make better business decisions. By some estimates this is a $10 billion market, or bigger.

On surviving the dotcom bust: We find ourselves in an incredible situation today because 9 out of 10 of our competitors got wiped out in the tech crash and the ensuing nuclear winter. They chased dotcom revenues and signed ego-driven leases on class-A office space. We're a big believer in class-B office space. I've never met a client who complained that our offices weren't fancy enough.

On competing with the big guys: Today we compete maybe 20 percent of the time against Accenture and BearingPoint and IBM Global Services, but those are much bigger firms that by and large seek different types of work and much larger contracts. Our bread and butter is sub-$5 million deals. So by and large, they're not interested in what we're doing. In our range of business, there's very little competition, so we're growing at a very healthy pace. And IT consulting is a fragmented industry. We've done 14 acquisitions over the past seven years, and we're looking to do 3 or 4 a year - IT consulting shops with roughly $12 million to $14 million in revenues - to further spur our growth.