MindQ's Partnership Strategy Boosts Revenues

The company's products are interactive and use eye-catching graphics to keep a student's attention. "It's visualizing technical concepts," said Opderbeck. "These are much more effective than reading a book." The company's 20 programs are now on CD-ROM, although by the end of the year, they will all be available via the World Wide Web through intranets and the Internet.

But Herndon-based MindQ is still a small company with only $430,000 in revenues last year and 25 employees. So Opderbeck has been on a mission to gain money and visibility through bundling and marketing agreements with larger companies. MindQ's partner list now includes Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash.; Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.; Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM; and publishing giant McGraw-Hill.

"That's really what has changed the landscape for us," Opderbeck said. He claims 1997 revenues will hit $2 million and 1998 will see at least $5 million, due largely to his extensive partnerships.

In part, Opderbeck's optimism comes from the company's greatest new market - Java. Companies everywhere seem to want their employees trained on the programming language created by Sun Microsystems.

"We have developed a leadership
position in the Java market," said Opderbeck. "Java is the mainstay of our business."

Sun Microsystems has had a marketing partnership with MindQ for about nine months. Joe Keller, director of marketing at Sun, said MindQ has emerged as a leader in the market of multimedia tutorials, especially in the Java space. And while there are many larger multimedia companies, Keller said being small has helped MindQ keep up with the rapidly changing Internet technology. "Their size makes it easy for them to react quickly," Keller said.

MindQ co-publishes a series of CDs for Microsoft Office training with a computer and information technology division of McGraw-Hill based in Burr Ridge, Ill. "They had a strong multimedia development engine and we had high-quality content," said Garrett Glanz, senior sponsoring editor at McGraw-Hill, who has been working with MindQ since 1995.

As long as MindQ keeps upgrading its technology, the company will be a leader in its market, Glanz said. "I'm excited to be working with them," he said. "They're in a ripe field."

While in the past MindQ has focused primarily on individual customers, the company's new focus is on corporations that want to train large groups.

So far, MindQ's largest corporate contract is training Novell's entire work force in Java. The program is completed gradually over nine weeks as a self-study with checkpoints where an employer can test for knowledge learned.

"Novell is the test case to make this all happen," said Opderbeck.