LogiSync Company Profile
by Julie Henry

Welcome to LogiSync, a local company riding the next wave of the internet revolution by producing devices called embedded network controllers. They're compact computers. And they give inanimate objects the power to communicate over the World Wide Web.

Ed Yenni: LogiSync's technology gets designed into an original equipment manufacturer's devices that allow those devices to be monitored or controlled remotely over networks.

You can point your web browser to a pump or a valve or a telecommunications power supply and be able to monitor and control it. In addition, the products allow those devices to send or receive e-mail. So if you wanted a device, if it was experiencing a particular problem, it would be capable of sending off an e-mail to people who care to then be able to take the desired action.

The nine-year-old company is the brainchild of Lorain native Ed Yenni.

Ed Yenni: I've always been interested in electronics. Unfortunately, when I graduated in 1978, there weren't a whole lot of opps in this area for me.

So, two weeks after Yenni picked up his diploma from Lorain High School, he bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. He became an electrical engineer and worked for Rockwell International. After several years, Rockwell asked Yenni to return to Ohio to head up a space station project at Cleveland's NASA Lewis Research Center, now known as NASA Glenn.

Ed Yenni: And so in the early 90s, then, I was able to come back here to Cleveland. It was perfect. My wife and I were just starting our family and it was exactly what we were looking for was that type of a transition.

When the space station project shifted to a NASA facility in Texas, Yenni decided the time was right to step out of the corporate world and start his own company.

Ed Yenni: Managing within an $11 billion company is much different from managing within a smaller company and so there were a whole set of skills that i had to learn there.

I went to the library and got out a book and there were three or four different books that I looked at. One of them seemed to be more technology based than the others, so I used that book as the basis for writing a business plan.

I was trained as an engineer and not to run a business. So I think (the) key to getting us up and going was to be able to bring in professionals on a retainer basis early on to help me make the day to day decisions sometimes that I needed to make that were outside of the engineering realm.

Yenni hired LogiSync's first employee in 1993 - a college friend named Carl Smith. The two set up shop in a farm house near Ashland, Ohio.

Ed Yenni: And I remember it was kind of interesting in the early days when a customer would want to come and visit you and of course we wanted to project this image of being larget than two people in a farm house in the middle of nowhere. So often times we would try to stall and say, oh we'll come to your place or whatever. But the initial customers that came out to visit us found it quite nice. There was a two-acre pond in front of the farmhouse and it was a nice break for them.

In less than a year, the fledgling company outgrew its pastoral setting. So Yenni moved LogiSync into a Westlake office complex to handle a growing list of clients, including household names like General Motors, Bose Audio, and Ever-Ready Battery.

LogiSync can lay claim to a number of success stories over the past nine years. But the company has also faced its share of challenges. In 1998, Yenni's friend and business partner Carl Smith died of kidney cancer. He was 38 years old.

Ed Yenni: I think there was a lot of concern that we were going to fold the tent and that would be the end of it. I looked at everyone and I said, look, Carl has taught you well. You've learned a lot from him and you are very capable of operating on your own.

And to the credit of the remaining employees here, we were able to grow the company that year and went on to yet another profitable year. Obviously, we still miss Carl dearly though.

With sales last year topping a million dollars and eight full-time employees, the Weatherhead School of Management named LogiSync one of northeast Ohio's fastest growing small companies for 2001.

And Yenni says he's ready to take LogiSync to the next level. He plans to move the company to Lorain County by the end of 2002. He's working with Lorain County Community College's Glide Business Development Center to find equity partners to help grow his business. Glide Managing Director Don Knechtges says the goal is to add 100 employees to LogiSync's payroll within five years.

Don Knechtges: We're providing help for LogiSync and LogiSync is committed to keeping their business, as they become a success, that those jobs will in fact remain in northern Ohio and in Lorain County for the help that glide has provided. So we think that's a very good tradeoff and one that benefits everyone.

Ed Yenni: It comes full circle, and this to me is very emotionally rewarding to be able to come back from right where I started and be able to hopefully help the local community in the process.

This is where the internet revolution is in fact taking place. The technology is coming from the other technology corridors. But the actual revolution in how it's changing the way manufacturers manufacture their devices and how sales and distribution channels operate is happening right here in the midwest.

So we happen to feel we have home-field advantage to fully exploit the second wave of the internet. Many of the companies, the technology companies that you see on the west coast, they've never walked through a steel mill, they've never walked through a plastics processing plant. So we feel that from a cultural standpoint, from a geographic standpoint, we are located where we need to be to exploit the next wave.