Engineers come full circle to Pondera
When Fred Behrmann, Mike Dolan and Yair Berenstein looked at their career options last fall, it was either sink or swim.
The three were engineers at Itron Inc.’s Spokane office, but they could see pink slips in their future. Itron was cutting about 30 jobs and the three men knew they were next in line.
In November, they decided to quit Itron and work together.
The consulting and programming company they launched, Pondera Engineers, now is snuggled into two rooms in the basement of the Spokane Intercollegiate Research & Technology Institute. With some luck, the three founders expect the company to grow large enough in three years to need a larger office of its own.
The three had first met while working at LineSoft Corp., which designed software tools sold to the power utility industry.
“We’ve gone full circle,” said Dolan, Pondera’s managing partner. “We went from a small company (LineSoft) which expanded to about 250 people. Then we joined a much larger company, and then we came back down to a small operation where we’re our own bosses again.”
Their field is a specialty niche within the electric utility industry. When utilities need to redesign power substations or replace or add transmission lines, they turn to firms like Pondera Engineers. In fact, Dolan said only two U.S. firms provide these services: Pondera and PLS, based in Madison, Wis.
As part of their exit from Itron, the company gained a full license to the TL-Pro software suite that they’d helped develop at LineSoft. The software lets Pondera perform sophisticated 3D analyses of exactly what happens along a power line when any number of variables are added or modified. A version of it also does similar studies for the physical design of substations.
Pondera has licensed TL-Pro to Avista Utilities as it relocates a 60-mile stretch of transmission line in the Rosalia area. Avista Project Manager Dave James said TL-Pro is a significant time-saver. “We spent considerably more time the old way, doing these projects by hand,” he said.
Pondera resells licenses to TL-Pro to companies like Avista, or it does the consulting and analysis for companies that ask for that service, said Berenstein.
“What’s great is that you only put data into the program (TL-Pro) once, and any time you make changes in a project, the program shows what happens,” he said.
Pondera has a three-year license from Itron for TL-Pro. After that period, it gets full control, said Behrmann, whose specialty is program design.
The company’s current largest customer is Energy Australia, one of that country’s largest utilities. That contract and most of Pondera’s nearly 70 others were originally arranged through LineSoft or through Itron, said Dolan.
Mima Scarpelli, vice president of investor relations at Itron, said Itron realized it needed to consolidate after acquiring five companies in the past two years. One area it saw as secondary to its operations was substation and transmission line design, she said.
“But we wanted to make sure that customers in that area were well taken care of,” she said, which led to Itron agreeing to transfer those customers to Pondera.