Software company moves to Daniel Island

A facility on Daniel Island is about to become home to software developer Modulant, a private venture-backed company with offices currently in North Charleston and on the West Coast.

Modulant, which currently has 115 full-time employees, plans to transfer its San Francisco headquarters to the facility known as the Cigna building on Daniel Island and expects between 12 and 15 of its Calif.-based employees to relocate to the Charleston area. While some will be executives and managers from the San Francisco office, the company will also move research and development workers from its office in Long Beach, Calif. The move from the West Coast is anticipated to create between 20 and 30 new positions within the company in the coming year.

Modulant was founded in September 2000 as a commercial software product development company, with Product Data Integration Technologies operating as a subsidiary. The latter was established 14 years ago as a pioneering software development and consulting services firm to assist federal agencies in sharing data. With separate boards and executive management teams, Modulant and PDIT acted independently until their operations were merged in November 2001.

Despite moving its headquarters to the Charleston area, the company plans to maintain offices in San Francisco and Long Beach. The San Francisco office, however, will move to a smaller location. Modulant also has offices in Chicago, Dallas, London and Stockholm, which will continue to operate.

Chief Operating Officer Don Bell, currently based on the West Coast, anticipates that by expanding to Daniel Island while still keeping the California offices open, Modulant will be able to develop its products, while strengthening its presence in the ­market. "Our mission is to build Modulant into the industry's premier interoperability solutions provider," says Bell. "With the consolidation, we will be in a position to offer our customers a turnkey interoperability solution, as well as decreased time to market with new and innovative product sets."

The average large enterprise has more than 1,000 unique sources of data, "islands of information" that are usually incapable of exchanging information with each other, explains Bell. This lack of interoperability among systems within an individual enterprise and across the supply chain can cost businesses billions of dollars in missed opportunities and misinformed management decisions, says Bell.

Modulant's technology platform facilitates information exchange between non-compatible systems, formats, standards, applications and databases. Modulant's patent-pending methodology captures the meaning, context and structure of data. This semantics-based approach differs from traditional solutions, which tend to focus on physical application connectivity and integration, Bell says.

Chief Technology Officer Peter Everitt is based in the company's North Charleston office. Citing optimum living conditions and a rich quality of life as the most persuasive recruiting factors, Bell and Everitt agree that the Charleston area is an ideal location for the expansion of the company.

According to local sources, Gov. Mark Sanford has been a driving force behind the company's relocation from California to South Carolina. The incentives offered by the governor to bring Modulant's headquarters to Daniel Island, according to Bell and Everitt, were centered on a combination of job development and job creation credits.

The deal closer, however, was the ability of the Governor's Office---along with the Department of Commerce, Berkley County Economic Development, Charles­ton Regional Development Alliance and Charleston Digital Corridor---to "think outside the box of traditional durable goods manufacturing companies," say Bell and Everitt. "The vision of an intellectual, property-driven digital economy in this area is what convinced us that we had the strategic alliances we were seeking," says Bell.

Although Daniel Island is home to the headquarters of technology company Blackbaud, which provides software to nonprofit organizations and educational institutions, Modulant does not believe that the relocation to the Cigna Building will spark any competition with Blackbaud, or with other local software companies. "Other high-tech firms in the area only enhance the overall pool of highly qualified engineers and scientists we depend on," says Bell. "They also enhance the area's digital business infrastructure necessary for us to meet our growth objectives."

According to Gene Eubanks, Modulant's CEO, the move from West Coast to East Coast will be complete at the end of April. Once Modulant's headquarters are on Daniel Island, Don Bell and Peter Everitt see only good things in the company's future. "The move will enable Modulant to make more concrete, strategic long-term plans," says Bell. "We expect to continue to grow and broaden our domestic and international market presence."