Room To Grow

It's a scenario you've seen too many times in too many places: unexpected volume overloads the computer system. Or the telephone system can't handle the flood of incoming calls and gives customers a busy signal. Could this happen to your new company? Not if you create an expandable architecture that delivers the capacity and flexibility a growing business needs.

Overload was a problem facing Universal Tax Systems in Rome, Georgia, when the company developed an electronic tax filing subsidiary. CEO Randy Tullos, 38, recalls that in the early days of this technology, the industry's growth rate was in the triple digits and volume was impossible to estimate. "Sometimes we'd have to forward returns to the IRS within a few hours of receipt--and some of them required heavy-duty number-crunching," Tullos says. The solution was not to buy the biggest and best computer system available but to create a LAN of PCs that could be reconfigured quickly to accommodate changes in volume, and then shifted back to another purpose when the peak demand passed.