By CASEY HIBBARD Staff Reporter
A small local company will play a major role in a history-making United States Postal Service (USPS) program celebrating the past century.
LDI, a Colorado Springs software consulting firm, has landed a contract to develop software to process a nationwide survey for The Gallup Organization. Gallup is handling surveying for the USPS in its historic “Celebrate the Century” project, where the public helps select stamp designs that reflect the cultural and historical flavor of the century.
Beginning in February, the public has the opportunity to influence stamp designs for each decade of the last half of the century by completing surveys to be available at a variety of locations around the country and on a Web site set up by Microsoft Corporation. A committee determines designs for the first half of the century.
Voting for stamp designs for the various decades continues through the spring of 1999. Stamps will be issued at different times between February 1998 and April 2000.
And after Americans have cast their ballots for stamp subjects, such as people, events, arts, entertainment, sports or science, the surveys will end up at Gallup’s facilities in Lincoln, Nebraska. There, Gallup will scan in about 100,000 surveys per day. Then LDI receives the data in batches and its software must process and analyze results from up to approximately one million surveys, with a total of five million database transactions, per day.
The software will be designed to run constantly and with little maintenance. LDI will train workers at Gallup on how to run the software. The program will provide daily reports to the postal service.
The project is five times larger than any Gallup has ever done in terms of the amount of data processed. The organization will distribute 65 million surveys for each of the five decades, with an expected return of 3.2 to 4.9 million surveys each decade.
The project also represents the biggest volume of any project LDI has yet handled, a full 10 times larger than any others. Despite the project’s unprecedented scope, LDI’s president and founder Steve Fisher said his company will approach it the same way it approaches all its other projects — with a skill and speed he says helps them complete projects faster and with higher quality than their competitors.
Fisher attributes the contract to the company’s established relationship with Gallup. LDI has worked with Gallup for about five years on a variety of projects involving software to process and analyze different types of data.
“They knew we could get it done, especially in such a short amount of time,” Fisher said. “We come in knowing what we’re doing and we get things done rapidly.”
And LDI can’t waste any time because the software must be ready for the unveiling of the first survey, covering the ’50s, which will be out in February.
The contract’s estimated value of $7.5 million is based on four million surveys processed for each decade. LDI’s actual revenues depend on the number of surveys processed.
The company expects the contract to increase business by 40% next year, following years of average annual growth of 10%. The contract also means LDI’s staff of 10 must add software engineers and information systems specialists.
The 10-year-old company, which has recently changed its name to LDI from LAN Design Incorporated, specializes in system integration. While it once concentrated on local area networks (LANs), it has now expanded to offer a full range of system integration services, including project planning and management; systems analysis, design and development; testing and implementation; and mentoring and training.
Past and present clients include City of Colorado Springs, General Motors, Kaman Sciences, Optika Imaging Systems Inc., Mobile Oil Corporation and the National Science Foundation. Currently, LDI’s software processes 50 transactions per second for AmeriTrade, a stock clearing house.
Fisher said the LDI (http://www.landesign.com) is currently working to improve itself. While much of LDI’s business has been national, the company plans to focus more now on picking up more Colorado clients. Their dynamic and flexible business model is a card LDI says it will continue to play.